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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28053129">Hello, My Name Is Your TV</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sp00py/pseuds/Sp00py'>Sp00py</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>TV Mono Cinematic Universe [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Little Nightmares (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Dead People, Gen, POV Second Person, rt to hold hands, spooky stuff</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-06</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 15:13:55</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>6,082</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28053129</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sp00py/pseuds/Sp00py</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Here take my hand. I'll take you home. You'll never have to be alone.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Mono &amp; Six (Little Nightmares)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>TV Mono Cinematic Universe [1]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/2152806</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>67</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Title and summary are from Ludo's "Hello, My Name Is Your TV." A v good song, u should give it a listen. Also I've not played any of the LN2 demo or followed much of any of the released content so far so....idk what canon is. That might change once I get around to playing the demo. Tags will be updated <s>if</s> as I write more.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>The world isn’t what you thought it was. It… Something’s wrong. Your stomach churns, your legs shake, everything is too close or too far away, like looking through a fisheye lens. You crouch down (when had you stood up?), your fingers twisting into your hair, causing small pinpricks of pain along your scalp. It grounds you, a little big. The floor is gross, torn up, moldy carpet covered in litter, debris, dirt, all lit by the unsteady glow of a snow-filled TV. You swallow against the urge to puke.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Once you feel secure enough in your balance, you stand. Slowly, warily. Taking in all the ways this world is wrong (but how is it supposed to be? What is right?), the way your senses scream as though they’d never felt the chill of the air or the stink of -- of whatever putrid thing was stinging your nose and making your eyes water. Mildew? Something worse?</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Beyond the aquarium glow of the TV is a darkness full of shapes. A wall. A doorway opening to further darkness. A lumpy </span>
  <em>
    <span>thing</span>
  </em>
  <span> piled up against the frame.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You turn back to the TV, and lean against its flickering surface, as though you can push your way past the staticky curtain and back into a warm world that your senses remember but you can’t quite recall. There’s a slight shift as the TV rocks, its feet uneven, followed by a sound like a gunshot that momentarily deafens you even as the screen goes white, then green, then black, a dazzling, blinding display.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Something oozes out of a crack you hadn’t noticed in the chassis, a thick noxious smoke. It makes you cough, forcing you away from the once comforting glow. You linger at the doorway, keeping that lumpy pile in the corner of your vision as you gaze back at the dark square only reflecting light, not making it anymore or ever again.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The TV is dead. You’re inexplicably, horribly sad.</span>
</p>
<p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<span>The building you’ve found yourself in (how did you get here? It feels familiar but so alien, rotten and aged and forgotten) is empty but for bugs, rats, and spiders. You stumble through dingy, sagging halls, dodging holes eaten through the floor from water, skirting piles of garbage that have uncomfortable shapes like limbs, like eyes and faces and people. There’s a sickly yellowish-grey glow from hall lights sputtering and struggling against the darkness. You want out, but every door just leads to another room, another hall, a dead end. All the windows are boarded up, though a smoggy night sky winks mockingly at you through the gaps. Your stomach growls, and you press a hand to it. That’s a goal, if you can’t get out quite yet. Find food, conserve your strength.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>So begins a new hunt.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Some rooms have TVs, all smashed or without power (you know, because you’ve tried each one, daring to hope, only for it to at best flicker on for a second, then pop and sizzle and refuse to turn on ever again), and those TVs have… people? Around them. Husbands and wives and grannies and grandpas, posed on chairs and couches, behind TV dinner trays and beside matted, moldy stuffed animals pretending to be pets. They’re all hazy around their edges, like a channel that’s not coming through well, the hall light spilling into the rooms but struggling to provide any actual illumination.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It unsettles you for reasons you can’t express quite right. It’s wrong, of course, and surreal, but also empty. There’s a loneliness that settles in your ribcage and makes you sniffle. You’ve never been here before, nothing is familiar, so you don’t know why you feel that way. It’s silly, and you have to focus on getting out, getting food. Not necessarily in that order.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You find a kitchen, eventually, with the boxy dead shape of a TV tucked away in the corner of the counter, adults staged as though preparing meals. The knife in the mother’s hand is rusty and dull, lingering above a pile of what you think was once meat, but all that’s left is dried out clumps and a few long dead maggots. Real food, fake people. You huff a laugh, because that doesn’t make sense at all, but maybe there’s something canned or dried that won’t kill you.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Flies buzz, very much not dead, from behind the cracked door of the fridge, so you take a wide berth around that, not wanting to know what’s </span>
  <em>
    <span>still</span>
  </em>
  <span> rotting inside, and begin opening drawers and cabinets.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>There are canned things that sound like food when you shake them, and you throw those to the floor behind you for a more thorough examination later. You scramble up to the counter and begin pushing drawers open, in search of a can opener.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A swarm of flies engulfs you as you riffle through jumbled kitchen tools, and you almost topple off the counter. The fridge door swings open on shrieking, rusted hinges, and your hands fly (bad word, there are flies </span>
  <em>
    <span>everywhere</span>
  </em>
  <span>) to your face as though that’d spare you from the putrid scent that rolls out, warm and moist. Your eyes are watering so badly, you can barely make out a figure uncurling from beyond the open door. Every instinct screams at you that this thing is dangerous. Don’t try to understand what you’re seeing, just run.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You flop off the counter and immediately trip on a can as you careen wildly toward the kitchen door. Bile burns at your throat. You right yourself, ignoring the pain in your knees and palms, and dart away. Whoever — whatever — is behind you lumbers forward, scattering the cans, knocking over the woman at the counter. She shatters into so many pieces, though the sound is almost drowned out by buzzing and slamming.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The halls are suddenly more treacherous than before, every hole appearing as if by magic, every bump and tear in the carpet threatening your feet. You glance back, see limbs bent in unnatural ways, hands wielding tools that punch holes into the walls and floor and drag the monster forward in uneven leaps. You don’t need to see more; you just need to hide.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>An open door. You dart in, pray it’s not a dead end. Another TV, another family. That’s it. No doors. No other escape.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The doorframe buckles as the monster chasing you collides with it, sending cracks along the roof and walls. Plaster dust rains down. The people in the room rattle like tea cups.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You fall on your face at the impact, and drag yourself underneath the TV, as though it wouldn’t have seen you crawl there from mere yards away.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It shuffles entirely into the room, and a light flickers on. The monster’s shadow sways with the swinging bulb, hands upon hands patting the floor, crawling slowly and laboriously around. Their knuckles are swollen, their lengths uneven and lumpy, covered in scabs, in flies gently licking at you-don’t-want-to-know-what.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You cover your nose and mouth against the stench, curl up, and wait for those long, mangled hands to find you. The only exit is past the monster. No windows, no doors, no -- you spot a small, dark rectangle underneath an end table. A vent, set into the floor. The abject helplessness that had settled in fades just a little, and in its place is born something new. Not hope, exactly, but determination.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You don’t know where you are, you barely know </span>
  <em>
    <span>who</span>
  </em>
  <span> you are, but you know that if that thing catches you, none of that will matter anymore. So you can’t be caught. You won’t be at the mercy of prayer and monsters.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You crawl to the edge of the TV, gauging your options. The monster’s face is wrapped in wires and tape. You’re not sure how well it can see, though there is the glint of dark, sunken eyes in there.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A cabinet stands almost within a foot of you, the bottom gap smaller than the TV’s so too small even for you, but it’s pushed away from the wall just enough that you should be able to slip back there. So can hands, your mind provides unhelpfully. Don’t think about that. Just continue. You can’t see what’s past that from this angle, but it’s a risk you’ll have to take, because you know it’s closer to the vent than you are now.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You dart across the gap when the monster’s turned away and shove, shove, </span>
  <em>
    <span>shove</span>
  </em>
  <span> yourself between the cabinet and the wall. It’s a tighter squeeze than you expected. You can barely breathe. Moving is hard and painful across the rough, unfinished back of the cabinet. You grit your teeth against splinters, and press on.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>A wayward staple or nail drags across your thigh, lacing it with sudden, red-hot pain. You choke a cry and freeze. The monster’s frozen, too, except for that endless drone of fly wings. You can’t see it so it shouldn’t be able to see you, right? But you feel as though it’s staring directly at you, as though there’s nothing between the two of you.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    <span>Go away, go away, go away</span>
  </em>
  <span>. Which is a stupid thought. It knows you’re in here. It just doesn’t know where (you hope). It won’t be going away because you willed it to.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Hands reach around the sides of the cabinet, and you slip a little further away from the edge, and away from your goal. Your breathing is loud in your ears, so you smother yourself with your hands. Now all you can hear is rushing blood and your pounding heart. You’ll have to breathe eventually. You imagine you can already feel your lungs struggling for oxygen, your brain getting fuzzy, though it’s been only a few agonizing seconds. Your chest hurts. The hands creep down each side. There’s nowhere for you to go, not even down into a crouch, pressed as tightly as you are between wood and wall.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’ll grab you on both sides, and rip you apart to get you out. Or shove the cabinet flush to the wall, crushing you. Or, perhaps worse, shoving it </span>
  <em>
    <span>just enough</span>
  </em>
  <span> that you can’t move. And you’ll die here, starving slowly, tongue thick with dehydration. Or you’ll just suffocate yourself here and now -- you wish your brain would shut up, because it’s not helping, but you </span>
  <em>
    <span>are</span>
  </em>
  <span> struggling to hold your breath, swallowing repeatedly as though spit could replace air. That last one might be more likely than not.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You release a tiny, furtive sip, and suck one back in. Another, longer, but just as modulated. Again. It sounds like wind rushing through a canyon, but it can’t actually be loud at all. You think.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The hands pull away. The monster steps back. You think of getting crushed, and throw away all caution.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You slither out with terrified speed. The cabinet shakes and glass tinkles, cracks, shatters as the monster slams against it, and its feet screech across the floor until it smacks flush to the wall. The room itself shudders. More plaster falls, larger chunks this time.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You hit a corner, and there’s a chair that’s too small for anyone in the room, tucked away like it’s been forgotten. Something easy to dodge. And then, there’s the end table. It had a cloth draping down, covered in tassels. Some moderate protection, if your mad dash had gone unnoticed.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You slink underneath and grab the cloth from the inside to still its swaying. And, again, you wait. You try not to think how you almost got crushed. It’s very, very hard not to think of, overwhelming any rational thought, screaming in your head that you nearly </span>
  <em>
    <span>died.</span>
  </em>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The vent. Focus on that, not on your brush with death, not on the monster now pulling the cabinet forward to see what it had caught.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The vent’s right here, heavy iron grate wrought into some pretty, geometric design. It’s covered in cobwebs, but you force your fingers through the gaps and heave as silently as possible. Finally, some good luck, as it shifts without trouble beyond its own weight, not bolted down. You quietly and frantically leverage it up with small yanks that take time you can’t afford, but it’s the only way you can get the grate off.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>After horribly long seconds, there’s enough of a gap for you to drop into. You land in a plume of ancient dust, and drag the grate back over. It falls into place with a click. You don’t bother waiting to see if the monster heard.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You pick a direction and crawl.</span>
</p>
<p><br/>
<br/>
<br/>
<br/>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>You see more of the outside world from the vents than any window. Blocked by a protective series of bars and fans that are slowly twirling from either old air flowing or idle waiting for someone (the monster) to turn them on and chop you up. You can’t bring yourself to go near the fans and see if the bars are loose. Not that it matters, given the height you seem to be at. There’s another apartment building across from you, windows dark and boarded, fire escapes rusted and falling away. Probably full of monsters, too.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>No more buildings. (You’ll need to get food, sometime, your brain reminds you, the traitor. Food is in buildings.) You want open air and whatever is not walls and halls and death. Food will be a problem for later you. You can’t eat now, anyway, the stink of rot and near-death still clinging stubbornly to your nose and your hair and your clothes.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>So you go down, shimmying through vertical plunges that would break your legs if you slip even once, through cobwebs and layers of dust and forgotten things that have fallen into the vents. Pins, nails, pennies. You pocket a few nails. They’re long and sharp under the rust, the length of your own hand or longer, and you don’t want to be caught entirely defenseless again.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You soon come across a vent faintly blowing cold air -- not as though it was on, but simply the air is that much colder. A basement? You absolutely do </span>
  <em>
    <span>not</span>
  </em>
  <span> want to go into a basement. But that means you’re on the first floor. That much closer to freedom.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You find a grate and press your face against it, searching for any signs of the monster (or other monsters). It’s a room like all the rest. Empty, which now you realize is a </span>
  <em>
    <span>good</span>
  </em>
  <span> feeling.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>It’s quick work to climb out, though you leave the grate off in case you need to beat a hasty retreat.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You pull out a nail and hold it like a knife as you step into the open. Still safe. Quiet. No slamming tools or buzzing flies. It gives you some time to reassess this situation and reorient yourself. Your leg aches, the gash in it gummed over with drying blood, but still hot to the touch, still sending pain radiating out along your muscles. You think of someone tending to your scratches and scrapes. Ointment, band-aids, kisses to make them feel better. You don't have any of those now, so will worry about the cut later.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You contemplate this room’s tableau carefully, an eye out for any detail that might be important, any movement that might be a new threat. You don’t like the effort that went into making these room seem like normal, lived-in homes. Because that makes you think maybe they </span>
  <em>
    <span>were</span>
  </em>
  <span> lived-in homes, and you have to wonder what happened to the people that feel so much like a family you once knew. If maybe these dolls...</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Gingerly, you reach up to touch the cold, porcelain hand of a woman wearing a puffy dress and apron. Her hair is done up in a messy bun, full of cobwebs. She doesn’t respond, because of course she doesn’t. She’s fake, and old, and abandoned, just like the rest of the building. She’s not a person. You can’t even tell what color her eyes are, they’re so coated in dust.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>This makes you suddenly, irrationally angry, as though without the immediate fear of attack, there’s a void left inside of you to be filled, and all that’s left is anger at this world you’ve found yourself in. Her eyes are probably brown, right? Soft and warm, with little crow's feet around the edges from smiling.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You put away your nail and clamber up the side of the couch, into her lap. A plume of dust rises, along with agitated roaches that prickle at nylon stockings, rustle underneath her slip. You hate that, and slap away at the folds of her skirt, chasing them all away from your -- your --</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You look up at her face, and use a bit of her apron to wipe dust away from her eyes. Blue. Blank. Just glass marbles, unfamiliar to you. Instead of crow’s feet, there are hairline fractures along her jaw, and an ear is missing. She’s nobody you recognize, and the person you expected from your memories (or dreams?) is replaced little by little with this thing when you try to call her to the forefront of your mind.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You shake your head and scramble back to the ground, wiping away tears from the dust in your own eyes. The woman’s skewed now, listing against her husband in a mockery of loving contact. Their heads are directed toward an intact TV set, and you, with hope squashed by failure after failure, try to turn it on.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You stare at the screen, still dark, still unresponsive, but for the screen-burned image of blurry words, an official looking seal, things that mean nothing to you but have been on every intact set so far. But then, there’s a tiny charge in the air. The screen blossoms into light like the rising sun. Static fills it, flickering wildly over an emergency alert, accompanied by a droning wail that raises gooseflesh.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Your heart leaps into your throat, and you choke back a cry -- excitement, terror, you don’t know, it’s all involuntary, and your brain has short circuited. </span>
  <em>
    <span>The TV is on</span>
  </em>
  <span>.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>The alert scrolls and jumps behind the static as a new picture tries to coalesce, long shadowy figures behind a crackling snow. The siren noise continues unabated, as though it’s been screaming for years and will continue to scream for more. You press yourself against the cool glass, feel electricity dancing along the hairs of your arms, tingling at your scalp.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>You want back -- you want inside -- you feel it deep in your bones, in your soul -- you belong </span>
  <em>
    <span>there </span>
  </em>
  <span>--</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I saw the comics and watched Doceo_Percepto do a playthru of the forest demo, so I know things now, many valuable things, that I hadn't known before. It mostly just wildly changed the ending of this chap and like... all of the future ones.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Darkness. Eyes. Pulsing light you can feel like pressure crushing you, then --</p><p>You collide with old leaves, wet soil, sticks and slime, and the world spins, tilts, gravity all askew as what should be the ground is now nothing but air, and the TV is a moldering forest floor. <em> That </em> makes your stomach lurch uncomfortably. Where did the TV go?</p><p>You push yourself upright, sputtering, eyes dazzled by a brightness that had burned past your lids. Frantic and half-blind, you spin around, arms outstretched as though that’ll help you see.  The TV <em> is </em>here, still, a glowing white square in a wild, dark world. It’s just behind you, instead of where it had been before, in front of you. Immediately, your panic quells. The TV’s still there.</p><p>Your gaze locks on it in confusion, and you crawl hopefully toward it. The screen flickers, then a face appears out of the snow. He’s staring at you. Which is absurd, TVs are looked at, not looked through, but you feel it in your hammering heart, in the icy grip crushing your lungs. He’s staring at <em> you </em>.</p><p>In all your life, you’ve never recalled being seen, much less being seen all the way through into your bones and brain. You want to run. Before -- before -- you don’t know what will happen, but you don’t want to stay and find out. You just know it’ll be horrific.</p><p>Move. <em> Move </em>. Movemovemovemove.</p><p>You run, kicking up leaves and stumbling over fallen sticks. More TVs flicker to life like eyes all around you, following. <em> Hunting </em>.</p><p>You stop because your side hurts and your throat is raw, and as you try to catch your breath, you realize there are no TVs anymore. Not living ones, at least. Broken ones, hung by their cords like nooses, or shattered faced ones on the ground, but there’s the telltale absence of electricity humming. It’s quiet and dark.</p><p>You drop to your butt and slump forward, chest heaving. The woods are so different from the building. Bitingly cold, empty, full of wet smells and rot. Your head hurts. Your feet hurt, scraped up on small rocks. The dampness of the forest floor is soaking into the seat of your pants.</p><p>The cold starts to ache in your veins, forcing you up, forcing you to move. You’re wearing nothing but a shirt and pants, both thin and worn. You should look for… you should look for….</p><p>You shake your head, trying to figure out what people needed to survive. Food. Shelter. Clothes, that’s it. You need more layers. That’s not something usually found in a forest though, right? You squint into the darkness, past the hanging trees of TV sets. Trees, shapes hanging like enormous, malformed fruit that unsettles you. More trees.</p><p>Right. Forests aren’t like buildings. They don’t have that monster, for one. But they do have TVs, which you don’t think is right. Where is the electricity coming from? Don't TVs need electricity?</p><p>A breeze blows through, shaking leaves from the trees and cutting at your skin. You won’t find any protection just standing here.</p><p>The forest floor is full of skittering bugs, snakes, things moving too fast for you to see. Everything makes you jump, until you’re too exhausted to be startled, even when you trip and fall into a slimy puddle that soaks your front. Your stomach growls. Your teeth chatter. You are far too small for this world.</p><p>Cawing picks up in the distance, a dispute between a murder of black birds as they hop and pick at something. Eating. Shedding feathers.</p><p>You think of maybe taking some of those shed feathers. Feathers went into things like pillows and comforters, after all. And then you realize, they’re <em> eating </em> something. Maybe it’s a something you can eat, too?</p><p>You find a stick bigger than you, but light enough you can hold, and creep closer, until you’re crouched behind a rock. They don’t notice you, too busy stealing food from each other’s mouth. They’re also much, much bigger up close.</p><p>You breathe deeply through your nose, mustering your courage born of hurt and hunger, and scramble up the rock to leap right into their midst with a yell. They scatter as you blindly swing your stick.</p><p>Some peck at you, pulling out hair and nipping your arms, but soon you’re alone.</p><p>Or, well, not entirely alone. They’ve not fled, but only perched in the trees, watching you with their dark, beady eyes. You’re suddenly, inexplicably tired of being watched.</p><p>You drop your stick and find a rock to throw with another yell. It sails wide, but hits the tree with a hollow thunk. They fly away in a whirlwind of feathers and angry cawing.</p><p>Finally, properly alone, you look down at your reward. Oh.</p><p>You’re suddenly not hungry.</p><p>You skitter back to the rock and hide behind it, as though that’ll block the image from your mind. A person. Half-eaten, rotting away with a cloud of flies, but a person nonetheless. Your hand flies to your mouth as you gag, imagination conjuring the gouged sockets black with old blood, the pecked and torn cheek exposing bone and teeth. A tongue thick and swollen with writhing, white maggots, chunks already pulled away.</p><p>The softest parts go first. You don’t know how you know, but you do. They rot easiest. You wish your brain would shut up, instead of providing you with images of brains collapsing in on themselves, of stomachs bloated with gases and discolored. Animals eat from the outside in, and bacteria work to meet them half-way.</p><p>You hit your head with the heel of your hands, over and over, as you try so hard to think of anything else. It’s just a body. It can’t feel all the horrors happening to it. It might have something you can use. Focus on that. </p><p>Your mouth is dry as you peek over the rock again. The black birds are respecting your steal, at least. The body’s untouched. Cloth covers it. Food has spilled around it, as well. Actual food, not the -- you were going to <em> eat </em> that.</p><p>You bring your shirt up over your nose, as though that will protect you from the stink, and approach more cautiously.</p><p>The picture you gain as your eyes rake the scene is somehow worse than just a corpse. A man, half his torso blown out and spattered with more holes, is curled over a much smaller (a you-sized) body. Both have torn lengths of cloth wrapped around their heads, though they’d been pulled free and loose by roving beaks. Food is spilling out of a bag, and you grab the strap, begin to drag the bag away. They don’t need it anymore, you tell yourself. It’s not theft. It’s survival. They didn’t survive, but you will. (Why didn’t they survive? Who did that to them?)</p><p>The bag is stained with blood and almost large enough for you to crawl into. You leave a trail from the bodies to a tree that you’re compelled to retrace and cover with old leaves and brushing hands to wipe away the tracks. By the time you retreat again, the birds are back, ready to feast once more. They can have what’s left.</p><p>You wash flecks of blood and flesh from an apple gone soft and mushy on one side in a stagnant pool of water. You eat the half that’s still firm, ignoring the squirming of something against your palm on the other side, not checking your bites for worms because your stomach is screaming. It tastes so <em> good </em>. You can’t remember the last time you’d eaten.</p><p>The juices run down your chin, and you chuck the rotten half of the apple into the woods. Then you dive into the rest of the bag. More food, mostly ruined, some maybe you can eat. A book. A knife too big for you to easily handle. Clothes.</p><p>You shake those out. They’re your size. A coat and wrinkled shirts and pants, all hastily shoved in, old but sturdier than what you’ve got now. You quickly look around before stripping out of your thin, wet rags and changing into these new things (not yours, stolen from a dead child). They’re all a little too small, for someone younger than you, but they’re dry and thick.</p><p>You pocket what you can, dried things and shriveled things to snack on later, then drag the bag closer to the tree and curl up inside, hiding away from the eyes of birds and the howling wind. No longer cold (still cold, just not as bad), no longer hungry (still hungry, but you need to save the food); exhausted, you sleep.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Dreams ooze into your mind, full of the comforting (frightening) flicker of TV sets. Shows upon shows, all familiar, all you’ve seen a hundred times. Commercials for food, toys, technology. The world opens up before you through the glow of the TV.</p><p>Behind you, your family watches, too, shadows on your periphery, equally enraptured. This isn’t a dream. This is what your life should be. You pull the blanket around you tighter as the commercials end and the show begins again.</p><p>There’s something in the scrolling that you’ve never noticed before. As though possessed -- mind fighting a creeping sense of dread, <em> nonono </em> -- your body leans into the comforting glow.</p><p>
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</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>You wake up, mind scrambling to hold onto the images and sensations you’d felt, but it’s slipping away into nonsense and the cold darkness of reality. You feel dirty, and not just from the muck around you, but like your brain has been scoured with grimy, sharp nails. A nightmare that hadn’t felt like a nightmare until you woke up with the wrongness of it crawling underneath your skin.</p><p>You climb out of the protection of the bag and sheltering roots and draw your coat close around you. The moon is high, breaking through the fog. You must not have slept long, or the night never ends. Horribly, exhaustingly, both might be true.</p><p>You need to move, though you don’t know where. Where to, where from -- you don’t know anything. You rub at your eyes, as though that will wake you any more, and look around. Several blackbirds stare balefully down at you, and the forest is cast in a flickering glow. It takes you a moment to separate it from the moonlight.</p><p>Not moonlight. No.</p><p>You whirl around, eyes wide in horror, reflecting back the static of a half dozen TVs strung up like fruit (or corpses) in the tree. How -- there’s no electricity out here (had that mattered earlier?) -- they weren’t on before --</p><p>Something shifts in the static, a dozen pupils behind snow locking in on you, and you instinctively cover your eyes. As though if you can’t see it, it can’t see you.</p><p>Absurdly, it seems to work. The pressure of some monster’s gaze on you fades, and you scramble blindly away to hide behind a tree. Once you feel the sheltering shadow cross over you, you slump down, though you keep your eyes squeezed tightly shut.</p><p>When silence suddenly descends, you realize that there’d been a white noise crackle ever since waking that you hadn’t noticed, until it stopped and the quiet screamed even louder. You open your eyes and contemplate the light. Steady, silvery.</p><p>Warily, you peek around the tree. All you see are dark screens and a few, wayward feathers. You hadn’t even heard them flee, but now there’s absolutely nothing here with you. You almost suspect if you went looking for bugs, you wouldn’t find those, either. You don’t check, though. You don’t want to know.</p><p>Far away, underneath those screens, is your bag. Your food. You would have eaten more if you’d known you’d lose it so soon.</p><p>Loss is becoming an easy thing to embrace, though you feel you’ve never had to experience it before (or have always known it? Your head hurts trying to think about the past, and that won’t help you now, anyway, so you stop). You’ll find food, somewhere else. Scanning the forest shows more broken screens that you’re afraid to get close to. You like watching TV. You don’t like making eye-contact with them.</p><p>As you leave the bag behind with what little restless sleep you’d managed to gain, you find yourself once again unsure about where to go. Are you even lost, if you don’t have any destination in mind? You feel lost.</p><p>Every darkened screen becomes an enemy, forcing you into a winding, confused path as you try to avoid them. Eventually, this leads you to what you’d known were something awful. Those things hanging from trees. Up close, silvered by moonlight, they’re obviously jumbled bodies, poured by someone into a cocoon of cloth and limbs. Things have come by and helped themselves to pieces here and there, and one of the sacks had burst open, spilling fetid, gooey bodies across the forest floor.</p><p>Almost uniformly, every head you have the misfortune to see has something across the eyes, or the eyes removed (not always by rot, sometimes there are <em> cuts </em>). Masks, cloth, scars. You touch your eyes.</p><p>The TVs are unpredictable, so many dead or off, others alive and scanning the woods. You try breaking the ones that are off, because you don’t want to gouge out your own eyes when you come across ones that are on, but the glass is thick and rocks just bounce off of them.</p><p>One bounces right back at you and brains you on the head, knocking you onto your butt. You curl up, hands pressed tightly to the wound. It’s already swelling, much as you try to push it flat and smother the pain. You feel personally attacked by the TVs, and throw another rock that sails past into the woods. <em> That </em> doesn’t make you feel any better, so you abandon that course of action.</p><p>You turn your attention instead to examining the trash littering the forest. Cans, bottles, shoes as big as your torso. Nothing useful, and you’re afraid of any cloth you find. What if it came from those cocoons? What if those stains aren’t mud, but blood? Why were there always so many flies, buzzing endlessly over amorphous masses?</p><p>The forest stretches on, and the more you move, the less you know where you’re going. It makes you want to sit down and cry in frustration and exhaustion, but your eyes only sting and nothing falls. So you push on, picking through the garbage and fallen leaves.</p><p>Entirely without pomp, you find a bag. It’s been crumpled up and thrown away, but there aren’t any questionable stains on it, and nothing gross inside. You shake off leaves and slap your hand around inside to open it up entirely. It’s paper, so nothing permanent, but thick enough, you think. It’ll work.</p><p>You take your new bag and look up through the trees. The moon is big and heavy and bright. You hate how the TVs catch its light, and gives you a momentarily heart attack that they’re turning on. You find a stick and a dry root to perch on.</p><p>The bag fits easily over your head, not too loose, not so tight it would tear. You blindly feel out the location of your eyes from the outside, and carefully pull the bag off to stab through it with the stick. You keep it all a little off-center for where your eyes are, try it, then continue to widen and tweak the eye-holes.</p><p>It feels good to have a goal, to be doing something productive, and your work distracts you from the utter nothingness around you.</p><p>Soon, your bag is ready. Your view is limited, unsurprisingly, but you immediately feel safer despite that. (Feeling safer hadn’t actually saved any of those other people. They’re still dead. There’s still something out there.)</p><p>You’ll take the comfort offered by your bag and ignore the fact that you’re not truly safe. But now you have nothing left to do. You need a new goal. Something small.</p><p>Getting used to your new vision, you dig your fingers into the bark of a tree and grope with your toes for hold. It’s slow going, but soon you’re rising from a miasma of fog and sting and flies, into what feels like fresh, clean, clear air. There are no TVs up here. No bodies or bags or cages.</p><p>You contemplate the moon, ignore the hunger creeping up, and the coldness in your hands and feet. You don’t know how to look for food, or shelter -- you don’t even know how to learn. You rub at your eyes under the bag. You really don’t want to die out here. Or anywhere, really, but especially not here, cold and hungry and alone.</p><p>But… what do you do now? You don’t know anything useful about the world, you realize. Weren’t there supposed to be people to help you? Parents, teachers, friends? You used to have all those in the TV shows you watched, but you don't have that anymore. All you have out here are black birds and TVs that frighten you. You tuck your legs up close to your chest, because if nobody’s here to hug you, you’ll have to do it yourself.</p><p>There’s the sound of some great bulk moving, and you twist around. There’s a pale face, like a tiny moon, framed by wild black hair lurking by another tree’s roots. She’s not the one making the noise. She’s staring at you, frozen. You don’t know how to handle this, either. Then a light cuts through the trees, the spell is broken, and a large hand scoops her up.</p><p>The thing that grabbed her had walked right below you, but hadn’t noticed you, too focused on his prey. You choke on your breath, and your heart clenches. He disappears between the trees, light bobbing and then disappearing.</p><p>Oh no. That was your fault, wasn't it? Horribly, you think so.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Stole some mommy issues from Doceo_Percepto's Mono and some imagery on the TV from Local 58.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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